White Star

by James Thayer

  The cabin's front door burst inward, the sound of the blow and the splintering of wood seeming to have a physical impact on Adrian. She flinched, then spun out of her chair. The door wagged left and right, its top hinge dangling loose and the knob hanging by a few wood shreds. Sunlight poured through the door. The room was alive with new light. Her hand went inside her jacket.

  Holding a deer rifle, Nikolai Trusov stepped to the door. He filled the frame and was backlit with rays of sun streaming off the black silhouette of his body like tiny searchlights. He was magnified by the harsh light, but his stony features were made murky by the shadows. Adrian hissed through her teeth at the sight of him.

  He held out the rifle. His voice was guttural and entirely foreign. "Give Gray his rifle. And give him this message—"

  "Not likely," she cut in.

  The Russian must have been astonished at her speed. She had told Gray she was qualified with a pistol. More than that, she was good with one. Her Smith and Wesson Model 459 weighed only twenty-eight ounces and had a four-inch barrel. It was small, yet it was a semi-automatic 9-mm Parabellum with a fourteen-shot staggered clip. So it was also fast. It whipped out from under her jacket, its nickel finish gleaming like evil. She was pulling the trigger before the Russian was in the sights. Thoughtful aiming was not this weapon's purpose, but rather it was designed to fill the air with projectiles. She fired six times, as rapidly as she could pull the trigger. The gun climbed a ladder rung with each shot. The flat crack of the shots rattled the cabin's walls. Dust drifted down from the chandelier.

  She lifted her finger from the trigger, the pistol still up and ready. Where she had expected to see a body there was nothing, just sunlight filling the doorway. The room screamed with the absence of the body that should have been there. The air smelled of burnt powder. She glanced through the door. One state patrolman was lying on the ground in front of the car, a slash of blood under an ear. The other officer was in the front seat slumped forward, his jaw open in mortal surprise. Trusov had killed them both a moment ago.

  Adrian kicked the door shut and stepped quickly to the wall near her desk. She held the gun up with both hands, her back against the log wall. The room had too many windows, too many places where the Russian could peer inside. She would be safer in the back bedroom. She bent low to pass under the window that looked out onto the destroyed woodshed.

  Trusov's arm lashed through the window, through windowpanes and sash bars. Glass chips and shards followed the swinging arm into the cabin. The arm seemed covered with sparkling scales that blinked and glimmered. The fracturing glass sounded like a harsh laugh. The hand seized Adrian around the neck, yanked her upright, then backwards through the shattered window, dragging her over slivers of glass. Glass fragments resembled teeth, and she seemed to be sucked back into the jaws of a dragon. A shard bit into her hand and she dropped her pistol.

  Glass hung from her jacket and hair. A necklace of blood appeared on her neck. Nikolai Trusov held her upright from behind, one hand on her neck, the other clutching her upper arm. His hands secured her like steel bands. His breath was on her neck.

  The Russian growled, "Give him the rifle and this message—"

  Adrian Wade had trained for years for this moment. All the falls on the mat at the dojo, all the tournament rounds. She fiercely jerked her head back, cracking her skull into his nose. He grunted with pain. His grip lessened.

  She abruptly shifted her weight to one side and launched her elbow back at his groin. She caught his genitals with full force, the point of her elbow sinking inches into his pants.

  He should have buckled over. He should have collapsed to the ground and lain there vomiting and gasping. Instead he lifted her fully off the ground and marched her to the next window. He caught a fistful of her black hair, then rammed her face through a windowpane. Glass shattered and shimmered. A cascade of flashing prisms surrounded her, a sea of glittering refractions. Cuts opened on her forehead, sending a wash of blood over her eyes. When he brought her head back out, glass splinters dug into her skin behind her ears, spilling more blood.

  "Why do you Americans never listen to anything?" he asked levelly, his voice a study in reason and courtesy. Again he had her by the neck and arm. "Will you listen this time?" He moved her head back and forth, as if she were nodding. "Good. I'm going to let you live because you are to give Gray the rifle and give him this message. I will be within eight kilometers of this house. He is to come into the field alone and with his rifle. Do you understand?"

  Again he tugged her head back and forth, forcing her to nod. He tossed her against the logs of the cabin wall, a casual offhand motion, but her head hit the wall. She fell onto glass pieces and lay motionless, her face a bloody mask. He retrieved the rifle from the porch. It was Owen Gray's Winchester 70 with the mounted Unertl scope. He treated it more gently than he had Adrian, propping it up next to her, carefully so as to maintain the scope's alignment, the butt on the ground.

  "I will be waiting for him." The Russian disappeared around a corner of the cabin.

  Only after several moments could Adrian push herself to a sitting position and dab at the blood on her eyes. She winced as her fingers pushed needles of glass further into her forehead. She tried to rise but could not. She blinked, and her eyelashes flicked away droplets of blood. She was too dizzy to move, so there she waited for Owen Gray.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Stealth or speed. The dilemma had been an endless source of debate among Gray and his sniper friends in Vietnam. Hurry but risk detection? Or proceed carefully and risk losing the target? No satisfactory answer was ever produced, but now Gray settled on speed. He moved up Black Bear Creek Valley at a brisk walk, the rifle in both hands.

  He was dead tracking, moving faster than the man who had left the sign. Gray glanced at several fresh footprints near the stream. Then came a rough patch of boulders, then bent stems of marsh cudweeds, then the prints again. Trusov's register indicated he had walked rather than trotted up the valley. Trusov was doing nothing to hide his direction or speed. Gray knew that at some point ahead, when Trusov decided it was time, the footprints would simply vanish.

  Noise is the exception in the wilderness. Silence is standard. Gray moved along the creek with unearthly quiet. A watcher might have concluded Gray was floating along the path. He was imitating a fox's walk, moving his feet in line, one directly in front of the other with each step coming down on the outside of the foot before rolling to the inside. The gait reduced the number of branches the legs might rasp loudly against, and the rolling footfall crushed fewer twigs and leaves.

  As Gray walked up the valley he also traveled into a new state of consciousness. His old skills had been slowly coming back to him since that day on the federal courthouse steps, but now he was enveloped in the armor of his Vietnam mind. The wound in his arm from Trusov's bullet should have been flooding him with pain, but Gray felt nothing. The scrapes and bruises—and he was nothing but grainy red scrapes and purple bruises from his mad slide—should have frozen him with pain, but he hardly felt them. He had the right to be propelled by revenge, but he knew that in the field hate kills the wrong person. Here, too, he felt nothing. And he should have been frightened, but he was dead to fear. He was a coyote, with no ability to ruminate, with no thoughts of the future or past, considering nothing but the ground that carried him and the flora that hid him. He had entered a fog of indifference where he would be distracted by nothing and would address only the puzzle in front of him.

  And that was all it was, a puzzle, no more complicated or monumental than a dime-store toy. Gray had to center a man in his crosshairs and pull the trigger, the irreducible act. He simply had to find those clues in the field that would allow him to move his finger back a half an inch before Trusov moved his own finger. Then the puzzle would be solved.

  Gray moved up the valley, passing aspen and cottonwood and pines. Black Bear Creek was a carillon to his right. He looked at nothing and at everything, using a
technique known as splatter vision, where he let his vision spread out. Rather than focus on any one object, he softened his eyes to gather in all in front of him. His field of vision was of half the compass points ahead.

  His face and hands were covered with brown and olive and green greasepaint. Some of his cohorts in Vietnam had worn loose clothing like the duelists of the last century, thinking an opponent would be deceived as to the location of the heart. But with bullets fired from a modern sniper rifle the precise spot the bullet entered the trunk was usually irrelevant. Gray wore a field uniform provided by Arlen Able that Gray had brought with him to the Sawtooths. Rawhide was tied around his pants legs at the ankles to keep the trousers from flapping. Several leafy twigs were stuck into buttonholes. On his feet were a pair of his father's buckskin moccasins that were almost as quiet as bare feet. He wore a regulation-issue Marine Corps utility cap. Gray had put several short syringa branches into the webbing, and the leaves bobbed against his head as he walked. He had cut flaps from the cap's sides, so pieces of cloth hung down on his ears and hair, breaking up the cap's lines along his temples. He had left his belt and wristwatch behind because of the danger of reflection. A length of rope secured his trousers. He wouldn't need to know the time.

  A Marine sniper in Vietnam entered the field traveling light, but even so his pack outfitted for a three-day mission contained over forty items, including tactical maps, washcloths, C-4 plastic explosives, wire cutters, extra boot laces, water-purification tablets, BFI blood coagulant, toilet paper, a strobe light, foot powder, a transistor radio, Kool-Aid, a Turkish battle-axe, and more. Gray carried far less. In addition to the rifle and what snipers called the basic load—eighty-four rounds in a pouch—Gray had with him only a pair of binoculars, a Swiss Army knife with screwdrivers for adjustments to the scope, a canteen, a pen, and matchbooks. In his pocket was a small spiral notebook in which he hoped to record his kill. Gray would sanctify the Russian's death by entering it in his notebook just as he had done for ninety-six other kills. Gray had no doubt Trusov also carried pen and paper. And a red shell.

  Gray suspected Nikolai Trusov had outfitted himself with almost the same load. The two men were now distillations of all that was known about the craft of the sniper, and this reduction made them identical. Everything Gray knew—every small stratagem, every trace of wisdom about fieldcraft—Trusov also knew. Their destinies had been intertwined since the day Gray fired at Trusov in Elephant Valley. Gray had been fated for this march along Black Bear Creek toward Shepherd's Bowl since then.

  Gray pushed through spikes of elephant grass, the Russian's tracks still plain. He ducked under pine boughs. The stream narrowed as it neared its source, and to avoid impenetrable brush thickets Gray jumped across the creek and back several times. As he neared the bowl, he began using a technique his sniper school instructors had called scanning, moving the eyes in abrupt and irregular movements, stopping the eye for only an instant on any one thing. Scanning is unnatural. The eyes demand a rest. But the technique allows the viewer to review and catalogue the immense amount of information the wilderness offered. Scanning seeks not animals or men but disturbances.

  He had suspected Trusov would head to Shepherd's Bowl. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. A sniper's instinct is to get the sun behind him, and the bowl was west of the cabin. Trusov would want Gray staring into the setting sun not just because it would impair Gray at the instant of the shot but also because gazing toward the sun is highly fatiguing, and with weariness come mistakes.

  Shepherd's Bowl offered something else to the Russian—a closed horizon, a self-contained dueling field. The bowl would fit Trusov's sense of order and his fervent desire to play the game. The bowl would also limit the area Trusov had to scout.

  Because Trusov had sent several shots into the Jeep, putting it out of action, Gray had used his belt as a tourniquet around Coates's shattered arm, and had left him at the fire tower. Gray had then taken two hours to hobble back to the cabin to find Adrian, and another hour had passed before an ambulance arrived for her, before he could leave her. A helicopter was on its way to the tower for Coates. So the Russian had been in the bowl several hours before Gray could get there, and in that time Trusov would have learned all there was to know about the area. Trusov might also have had maps of the area.

  Gray jumped the creek again. The sky was narrowed by the valley walls and darkened by tall trees, but it was opening up ahead. Another five hundred yards would put Gray at the mouth of Shepherd's Bowl. His options now were to travel faster or slower, but not at a walking pace. Nothing in the wilderness—not a deer or a wolf or a snake or a bear—moves at a human's pace, and anything traveling four miles an hour is always a target. He slowed, coasting over the ground. His feet melted to the earth's contours. Gray let the wilderness soak him up. He might have been invisible.

  The memory of Adrian tried to push itself into his mind, and only with effort could he dismiss it, his eyes scanning and scanning. He had left her in the care of a physician and ambulance attendants. She had worn on her face most of the blood she had spilled, and so looked worse than she was. She wouldn't need to stay overnight at the clinic in Ketchum. Still, she would require stitches near her shoulders and behind her ears. Butterfly bandages would be sufficient for her forehead. The doctor said she might have a slight concussion, but she had been asking Gray questions, as always. Gray had gently chided her. He was relieved when she laughed. Gray had peeled her hand from his, then taken up the rifle to begin his journey to Shepherd's Bowl.

  Gray rushed up in shadows cast by the trees in front of him. He ducked left and right, left and right, to new shadows, always nearer to the bowl's mouth. Nikolai Trusov was within two miles of him, of that Gray was certain. The most dangerous thing in the field for a sniper is another sniper, because he knows what to look for. Those tactics of travel and camouflage that made Gray blend with the wilderness worked only up to a point with another sniper, who would see what others could not and expect what others would not. Gray stepped around a chokecherry. Through the trees he could see the bowl's west wall. The sun was lowering in the afternoon sky, sending out spokes of gold light that turned like a wagon wheel.

  Black Bear Creek dwindled to rivulets winding between stones. Not far into the bowl was the small pool where the stream originated. As Gray moved forward, the valley grew in front of him until it filled his vision. He stood behind a lodgepole pine and pulled his binoculars from the pack. He held his hand above the objective lenses to guard against reflection.

  Shepherd's Bowl was a study in shifting greens and browns. On Gray's right the north slope resembled a desert. Lower on the north slope were the muted dusty greens of sagebrush and bitterbrush and mountain heath and Scotch broom, with green leaves shading to yellow. Higher on the slope, brown and gray boulders were spotted by stonecrop with its tiny, waxy green pods.

  Gray shifted the binoculars. The bowl's center was a mix of grasses that had dried to yellow. Lodgepole and yellow pine, mountain hemlock and mountain laurel, dotted the patches of grass. The trees were dense along the bowl's east–west crease.

  On Gray's left was the south slope, the darker wall where the green of lodgepole pine was touched with the blue and black of shadows.

  Gray moved the binoculars right to left again, looking for agitation in the underbrush, looking for a too-straight line, looking for the slightest of reflections, looking for color that was too lively, looking for anything white or black, looking for perturbed crows or jays, never focusing on one thing for too long. All he found was more green and brown.

  Trusov's footprints went due west, entering the long swath of trees on the seam of the bowl along the creek. Following this long dell was the only way to enter the bowl unseen by anyone on the bowl's slopes, and this was the route of Trusov's prints. To follow the Russian's path would most likely mean walking into a trap.

  Gray moved west through the trees into the bowl, then took a dogleg route, south a few paces, then west agai
n. He walked with exceeding care, slowly and with patience, following Trusov's westerly route but by a parallel course a hundred feet from Trusov's trail. He watched the ground, avoiding dried foliage that might crackle underfoot. He moved so silently he could not hear his own footfalls. The Winchester was across his chest.

  He approached a dell, a hundred-yard expanse spotted by only a few trees. The spring and pool were to Gray's left. The odor of tarweed carried to Gray. The dell was also filled with sow thistle and yarrow and knapweed. Gray lowered himself to his knees and elbows and crawled forward to survey the dell. He shimmied along the ground around a pine tree to two rotted logs. One tree had fallen over the other several years after the first came down. Gray crawled into the vee formed by the logs. The fallen trees were so old that dandelions were growing from their decomposed bark. Gray flinched when a goldfinch flashed by. The bird trilled as it flew, the notes sounding like "potato chips, potato chips."

  Gray checked over his shoulder. From behind he was protected by an upright pine. His hide was almost fully enclosed. He was satisfied he was in a position a bullet could not reach. Gray rose to kneeling, brought his backpack around, and reached for his binoculars. Moving half an inch at a time, he rose to peer over the log.

  Sound and the pain rushed over him at the same instant. An explosion from above lanced his back from shoulder to the base of his spine. Ferocious jets of pain. Gray toppled sideways onto dry cheat grass. His back felt as if a surgeon had opened it with a scalpel. He gasped with pain, then scrambled closer to a log, trying to tuck himself under it. He didn't know where the danger lay. Blood was left on the ground. He squeezed his eyes against the racking pain, then opened them to stare skyward.

  Around the tree above him, about fifteen feet off the ground, was a circle of baling wire. Something had been attached to the tree. Gray's hand found several fragments of pottery, portions of a plate. Then he saw a littering of nails.